ShoreTel goes big in hosted VoIP: A Q&A with CEO Blackmore

02.10.2012

You guys built your reputation on unified communications and a couple of years ago you went out and bought Agito Networks for the mobility piece, so where do you hang your hat today? Do you still position yourselves as a UC company or lead with mobility or a blend of both?

We're still clearly a UC company, but UC is evolving and I think your question about mobility is a good one because the mobile user is extraordinarily demanding. They want the same set of facilities as if they were sitting at their desk and they had a sophisticated desk phone linked to Outlook.

We've taken Agito's code, enhanced it a lot, and today we're winning a lot of premise sales because of our mobility capability. We also ported mobility to cloud and that was the first evidence you could port a premise out to cloud. We did it in 90 days and it's up and running and we've already got orders and people using it.

So what we're focused on is the experience of the mobile executive or salesperson or . Because we think that's the big win in UC going forward. We've got a very good reputation today for doing UC at the desk and also making it a very simple application to run from an IT perspective. What we want to do is have that brilliantly simple and high expectation of usability and the same sort of graphical user interface provided in .

Do you get questions about mobility in most every engagement at this point?